Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose on Super Bowl Sunday, 2014. He was a great actor and about as close to the archetypal tortured artist that Hollywood has nowadays. He was open in his past with drugs and his recent, final relapse. Perhaps that relapse is why America got to see Paul Thomas Anderson fumble through an interview with Jon Stewart to promote The Master instead of the star of the movie.
Twister was my introduction to him, but the first one I remember him being in was Happiness. It should be noted that I did not finish that Todd Solondz movie (I gave up during the scene where one of the characters masturbates to teen boy magazines in the back seat of his car) but I still remember Hoffman's tortuously painful scenes making obscene phone calls to a woman he's obsessed with. I still haven't finished that movie, though the synopsis says his character gets at least a little bit of a redemption.
The funniest film I saw him in was State & Main, a satire where he plays a screenwriter realizing his vision is going to be chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine. He gets help from Rebecca Pidgeon's local bookstore owner, who is presented as an almost literal Greek muse. The film is very inside-baseball but not so much as to alienate viewers; the characters are barely hanging on to the belief that they're making art, but the film itself knows it's all bullshit.
Most recently I saw him in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, though his performance seemed like a sleepy, check-cashing exercise than an attempt to elevate the material. It was interesting to see him in a movie that relied almost completely on franchise appeal, but he didn't have much to work with, and what he did have was merely a set-up for the politically-minded finale.
Synecdoche, New York may live on as his masterpiece, though I was lukewarm on it after the first viewing. Its so self-consciously a tour-de-force, written and directed by a guy whose entire oeuvre is about looking inward, usually literally (the hole in the wall in Being John Malkovich, the tricky memory in Eternal Sunshine). Hoffman was so actor-y, so up front with displaying the techniques he employed to move an audience, yet they rarely verged into parody. Paul Thomas Anderson may have called these idiosyncrasies "business", but they were an integral part of his toolkit as an actor.
Seeing him act was a lot like watching the original version of The Blob. Steve McQueen's Method chops put him on such a different level than the rest of the old school actors that it's like he's in a completely different movie. Maybe that's what's so disappointing about his role in Catching Fire. Surrounded by one Oscar winner and another respected veteran*, he decided to merely bend down to the level of the material. He was under no obligation to do so, but seeing him work his magic in a tentpole blockbuster would have been an amazing thing to experience.
*Typing that out, I just realized Jennifer Lawrence has one Oscar and Donald Sutherland has never even been nominated.
